How one of publishing’s most hyped books became its biggest horror story — and still ended up a best seller.
On a mild Monday this past February, a tense meeting unfolded in a skyscraper in downtown Manhattan. Four Latinx writers and activists sat on one side of a long conference table. Facing them was a collection of white editors and executives from Macmillan, the publishing house that had recently put out American Dirt, the most controversial book of the year, or maybe the century. A representative of Oprah Winfrey’s listened in on the phone, and a platter of sandwiches sat on the table. “I wouldn’t eat the sandwiches,” recalled Myriam Gurba, one of the activists. “Those are the enemies’ sandwiches.”
In the months leading up to American
Dirt’s publication, Macmillan had positioned the page-turner — about a mother
and son escaping cartel violence in Mexico — as a definitive chronicle of the
migrant experience. Prominent readers had praised it in terms worthy of a Nobel
Prize. The novelist Don Winslow called it “a Grapes of Wrath for our
times.” Oprah, who picked it for her book club, wrote, “This
story changed the way I see what it means to be a migrant.” Gurba, who is
Mexican American, saw it differently. In an essay for Tropics of Meta, an
academic blog, she described it
as shallow and full of harmful stereotypes and accused the author, Jeanine
Cummins, a white woman, of writing “trauma porn that wears a social justice fig
leaf.” Many agreed. The early praise gave way to a flood of criticism:
Thousands of articles and tweets took issue with the author’s identity, the
book itself, and, crucially, a massive marketing push that was viewed as
tasteless and misleading. There was a plan to protest Cummins’s cross-country
book tour. The week after the novel’s release, the tour was canceled. “Based on
specific threats to booksellers and the author, we believe there exists real
peril to their safety,” wrote Bob Miller, the president of Flatiron, the
Macmillan imprint that had published the book. “We are saddened that a work of
fiction that was well-intentioned has led to such vitriolic rancor.”
Gurba belonged to a network of Latinx
writers, DignidadLiteraria, that had formed in the wake of American Dirt’s
release to address what its members saw as systemic racism in the publishing
industry. The group had requested the meeting at Flatiron because it hoped the
company might listen to some of its proposals. In their detailed presentation,
the activists urged Macmillan to hire more Latinx editors and to start an
apprenticeship program to attract new talent. They pressed the company to open
an imprint for Latinx writers and to provide those writers with the same level
of support and publicity Cummins had received. Miller had agreed to meet with
them because he wanted to understand their perspective and hoped to quiet the
negative attention the book was getting. “He seemed to think, We will
listen,” one employee said, “and then they will not be as heated in their
rhetoric against the author. And we’ll all just work it out. But I don’t
think that was ever really on the table.”
I wouldn’t eat the sandwiches. Those are
the enemies’ sandwiches.
On the publisher’s side, Miller and Don
Weisberg, then the president of Macmillan, did most of the talking. The book’s
editor, Amy Einhorn, was mostly silent. The executives expressed interest in
the activists’ suggestions, but they also wanted to discuss the tone of the
online discourse. Miller comes from a generation that prizes “civility,” one
employee noted. “He could be accused of tone policing,” added another. Gurba,
who had received a barrage of menacing emails since publishing her essay, was
disturbed that Miller seemed to be “equating the criticism Jeanine was
receiving with the death threats I was receiving,” she said. As Miller and Gurba
began to argue over this, one Macmillan staff member blurted out that Cummins
had never received any actual death threats. “Everybody just went dead silent,”
Gurba recalled.
Over the past few years, writers of color
have pushed conversations
around race and representation to the forefront of the
young-adult-fiction world, prompting publishers to pull controversial books
from the pipeline. But the proprietors of commercial literary fiction seemed
curiously immune to scandal. Although editors and writers of color had been
talking about racism in the industry for years, this corner of the book world
had largely relegated its own discussion of the issue to diversity panels at
conventions — until a year ago, that is, when a novel about the humanitarian
crisis unfolding across our southern border precipitated a publicity crisis in
the publishing houses of Manhattan. As it happened, the book would also turn
out to be one of the best-selling novels of the year. I spoke to employees at
various levels throughout Macmillan, all of whom asked to keep their names and
titles confidential out of fear of losing their jobs, about the rise and fall
of American Dirt. In retrospect, they felt it was inevitable that a
storm of criticism would overtake one of their titles sooner or later. Still,
there were unique circumstances behind the publication of this book, one
employee pointed out, that “allowed for certain things to get out of hand.”
American Dirt first landed on
the desks of editors in the spring of 2018. One editor who had advocated for
her imprint to acquire the manuscript recalled reading the opening scene while
getting a pedicure during her lunch break and thinking, “Holy shit, I’m not
going to be able to put this down.” At the center of the story is Lydia, a
middle-class bookstore owner from Acapulco; life is good until her husband, an
investigative journalist, writes a profile of a cartel boss who happens to be a
charismatic regular at her shop. When the cartel murders her entire extended
family, Lydia and her son attempt to flee to safety in the U.S. In the first
sentence, bullets fly through an open window; by page 18, Lydia and her son are
on the move, heading for “la Bestia,” a gang-controlled high-speed freight
train that only the most desperate attempt to board.
“There’s this lore in publishing that
immigration books don’t work,” said the editor, who is white. “I remember
telling my boss, ‘I feel like this is finally a book about immigration that
people who have no interest in immigration will read.’ ” She didn’t consider
the identity of its author — perhaps in part, she said, because there was some
murkiness around it. In a 2015 New York Times op-ed, Cummins wrote that
she had a Puerto Rican grandmother but identified as white. When her agent
began sending around the manuscript, he exaggerated the author’s connection to
her subject. “Jeanine is half Puerto-Rican and speaks fluent Spanish, which
allowed her to do extensive research in Mexico, lending AMERICAN DIRT its
hard-won and impressive authenticity,” he wrote in his pitch letter. In any
case, the editor wasn’t concerned about whether the book was authentic. “That
wasn’t a question anyone who was publishing commercial fiction was asking at
the time — not if a book was this gripping,” she said. “It was more like, ‘Wow,
this book is incredible. It’s going to be expensive. How much is it worth?’ ”
A lot of editors had the same thought.
Nine publishing houses entered an auction that lasted three days and resulted
in a seven-figure advance, the kind of deal only a handful of writers a year
can pull in. Einhorn, a white editor who was then the publisher of Flatiron,
won the auction. She had built a reputation as a “hitmaker,” as one observer in
the industry put it: “She has an eye for what’s going to sell.” Under Einhorn’s
leadership, Flatiron had become known for accessible fiction aimed at the
broadest possible audience. Her career hits include Liane Moriarty’s Big
Little Lies and Kathryn Stockett’s The
Help, another divisive best seller written by a white woman from the
perspective of characters of color. (Through a publicist, Einhorn declined to
be interviewed for this story.) In a 2014 interview with Poets &
Writers, Einhorn said she didn’t consider Stockett’s identity when
evaluating The Help. “If the author bio influences you one way or
another, that’s a problem,” she said. “It should be the work itself that speaks
to you.”
At Flatiron, Einhorn’s acquisition
of American Dirt was greeted with excitement and became an immediate
subject of discussion at sales meetings, drawing the kind of attention most
books don’t receive until closer to their publication date, if ever. A team of
four people, all of whom were white, worked with Einhorn on the book, but “she
was the person who made the call on every major decision in that publication
process, with very little discussion or oversight from anyone else,” one
Macmillan employee said. As both editor and publisher, Einhorn occupied a uniquely
powerful position. She was able to amass considerable resources to throw behind
the work of fiction: a six-figure marketing budget; 10,000 early copies sent
out to booksellers, many with handwritten notes; a lavish party at BookExpo
more than six months before the novel’s publication. “I had never seen anything
like it,” another Macmillan employee told me, “in terms of the sheer amount of
attention and resources that were going into the book.”
The early response was ecstatic. Booksellers loved it. Famous authors blurbed it in reverent terms, calling it “a moral compass” (Ann Patchett) and “rich in authenticity” (John Grisham). Not all the praise came from white writers. Sandra Cisneros, the Mexican American author of The House on Mango Street, declared, “This book is not simply the great American novel; it’s the great novel of las Americas.” When Oprah chose it for her book club, she helped cement its fate as a best seller. The hype elevated Flatiron’s already high expectations. “There was certainly a feedback loop,” one employee said. Book clubs tend to pick books that are likely to be hits, and publishers depend on book clubs to raise the profiles of books they believe have hitmaking potential. Half a million copies were announced for American Dirt’s first print run; though not an unheard-of number for a book with a seven-figure advance, it turned heads in the industry.
Einhorn and others had initially spoken of the book as a commercial page-turner, several Macmillan employees noted, but as the publication date drew closer, the editor seemed to lean into describing it as a literary masterpiece. Originally, advance copies had been splashed with a quote from Stephen King — “One hell of a novel about a good woman on the run with her beautiful boy” — but when Winslow’s Grapes of Wrath blurb arrived, it was swapped in. “There are certain ways of elevating a book so that it seems as though it is meant to define an experience,” one Macmillan employee explained. Einhorn had deemed American Dirt one of those rare, “profound” novels that “changes how we think about the world.” In an editor’s note affixed to advance copies, she stressed the author’s moral agenda, noting that Cummins had embarked on this project because migrants at the border were being portrayed as a “faceless brown mass.” The author, she explained, “wanted to give these people a face.” In a lengthy author’s note, Cummins elaborated further: She hoped that when readers saw migrants in the news, they might remember that “these people are people.” She confessed she had at times wished “someone slightly browner than me” would have written it, but her belief in the importance of her mission won out. “I thought, ‘If you’re a person who has the capacity to be a bridge, why not be a bridge?’ ”
Stories about how Einhorn was talking up
the book circulated around the office. Several employees recalled hearing about
her performance at a sales conference where she had compared American Dirt to
the Pulitzer
Prize–winning novel Roots, by the Black writer Alex Haley.
(Through a publicist, Einhorn said she had no recollection of saying this.) “Roots was
a book that explained and defined what slavery had been,” one employee said.
“And Jeanine was going to be the person who defined what the migrant experience
was.” All these choices made the book “something more than a thriller —
something that was supposed to be important.”
Some four months before the book’s release
date, Einhorn moved on to a new position as the president and publisher of
Holt, another Macmillan imprint. But she continued to oversee the publication
of American Dirt — an unusual arrangement, employees told me. “She
thought it was going to be a huge hit,” one said. “And she wanted to make sure
she was the only one getting credit for it.”
In her essay titled “Pendeja, You
Ain’t Steinbeck: My Bronca With Fake-Ass Social Justice Literature,”
Gurba criticizes American
Dirt for its reliance on “overly ripe” Mexican stereotypes, for its
portrayal of characters who are either comically evil or angelically good, for
the inaccurate Spanish sprinkled in italics throughout the text, and for the
“white gaze” of the authorial perspective, which “positions the United States
of America as a magnetic sanctuary.” Published in a small online journal, the
essay didn’t make much noise, but a month later, a review by the New York Times book
critic Parul Sehgal set the internet ablaze. “I found myself flinching as I
read, not from the perils the characters face, but from the mauling the English
language receives,” Sehgal wrote.
She did not believe Cummins’s identity should have barred her from writing
about the topic. “But it has to be done well,” she told me. She was “shocked at
the lack of care.”
As many came to see it, Flatiron had
inadvertently brought on this derision. “As soon as they called it a work of
literature, they opened themselves up to a new level of criticism,” one
publishing insider said. “They invited in readers who are much more well versed
in conversations about race and immigration, and, of course, those readers will
start to pick it apart.” By the time Oprah announced her pick, more than 140
writers, including Viet Thanh Nguyen, Kiese Laymon, and Rebecca Solnit, had
signed a letter urging
her to reconsider her choice. Salma Hayek apologized for
promoting the book on Instagram and said she hadn’t actually read it.
It’s possible the backlash would have died
down if critics hadn’t uncovered several bizarre details from the book’s
promotional campaign. Gurba unearthed a tacky photo from Cummins’s Facebook
feed taken at the party Flatiron had thrown for her at BookExpo. The floral
centerpieces were decorated with faux barbed wire — a reference to the
illustration on the book cover. And while all modern publicity campaigns in
publishing ask authors to draw out their personal relationship to the material,
it appeared that Cummins’s connection had been cynically played up. The author
had previously identified as white, but in a Times profile
that came out shortly before the publication date, she said she was “white and
Latina.” In her editor’s note, Einhorn had written that Cummins was the wife of
a formerly undocumented immigrant, and in her own note, Cummins described her
fear that he might be arrested and deported. Neither mentioned that her husband
is Irish, a fact that came as a surprise to some Macmillan employees. “I had
assumed, based on the way the book had been presented to us, that he was from
South or Central America,” one staffer said. “I found out he was Irish after
publication day, and I would say my jaw dropped.”
Through a publicist, Cummins declined to
be interviewed for this piece. Last March, she told the Evening
Standard that the author’s note was her biggest regret and suggested
Flatiron had pushed her into writing it: “The first question in those early
editorial meetings was always ‘Why did you write this book?’ I’d give my
answer, but it wasn’t enough.” (The note was removed in the second printing.)
On the day the barbed-wire centerpieces
went viral, employees of Macmillan gathered for the annual all-staff meeting.
Most had nothing to do with the publication of American Dirt, and
many of the younger staffers in particular were upset by what they were
learning about the process. One employee asked John Sargent, then the CEO of
Macmillan, for his thoughts. “Are people saying this author is not allowed to
write this book?” he replied. “Because a woman can write a book from the point
of view of a man.” Some understood his perspective. Sargent “comes from a
certain publishing tradition,” a Macmillan employee explained. “He is a staunch
defender of freedom of speech, and he publishes all different points of view.
When people objected to the book being written by someone who wasn’t of the
ethnicity of the characters, on principle that upset him.” Others described his
response as “bungled.” If the author’s identity were irrelevant, why had
Cummins and Einhorn overstated her tenuous connections to Latin America and
reached for authenticity as a marketing tool? He “hadn’t yet understood what it
was that was bothering people,” one Macmillan employee said. “The problem
wasn’t necessarily that she wasn’t Mexican — the problem was that we published
the book in a way that we said defined Mexicans.”
A day later, Macmillan released a
statement noting that “the concerns that have been raised, including the
question of who gets to tell which stories,” were “valid.” Yet “we ultimately
go back to the novel’s intention,” it continued. The story “gives us empathy
with our fellow human beings who are struggling to find safety in an unsafe
world.” “It was poorly written and poorly conceived,” one employee said of the
statement. “Everyone at Flatiron was deeply unhappy with it.” Internally, the
senior leadership stressed that the company should double down on its support
of its author. “Amy was telling people, ‘We don’t need to pay attention to
this. It’s going to go away,’ ” another staffer recalled.
It did not go away. Activists began to
organize protests, intending to hold them along the route of Cummins’s planned
40-stop book tour across the country. One of the stops was Blue Willow
Bookshop, a store in a mostly Republican neighborhood on the west side of
Houston. The owner, Valerie Koehler, a white woman, had loved American
Dirt. So had her staff. They had all read it back in the summer and held a
book club at Koehler’s house to discuss it. “We all thought it was a really
good thriller, I’m not gonna lie,” she said. They related to the protagonist —
a middle-class mother who happened to work in a bookstore. “She was a
bookseller in a city, and we were booksellers in a city. And what would happen
if we had to save our child? That was what we talked about.”
The problem wasn’t necessarily that she
wasn’t Mexican— the problem was that we published the book in a way that we
said defined Mexicans.
Koehler and her staff were surprised when
they learned about the backlash. “We all looked at each other and thought, What
did we miss? Are we kind of tone-deaf?” Koehler said she was open to having a
conversation about whether the book had flaws but grew upset when she received
an email from a Latino radio host in Houston. The email, shared with New
York, was polite and perfunctory, informing Koehler of the fact that he and
other local activists planned to protest Cummins’s reading outside her store,
but she had found it “threatening.” She worried the protesters would “make it
very uncomfortable for the other people in the audience. And I want it to be a
pleasant experience when you come to my bookstore,” she said. Koehler called
Flatiron to say she could no longer participate in the tour. A few hours later,
she learned the imprint had decided to cancel the tour entirely after having
conversations with concerned booksellers like herself. The company released a
lengthy statement, acknowledging it had made “serious mistakes” while accusing
its critics of the same. It attributed the cancellation of the tour to “threats
of physical violence” and “concerns about safety.” (A Macmillan employee told
me the company had never received or reviewed any threats but had heard from a
handful of booksellers who said that they had.)
Many Macmillan employees found this
statement more offensive than the first. “It made it seem like the people who
were upset with her were dangerous, vicious savages,” a Latinx Macmillan
employee said. One of the problems with the book itself “was a representation
of Latinx people as vicious, dangerous savages,” the employee continued. That
was “the worst message they could possibly send.” Recognizing the staff was
unhappy, Macmillan held a series of town-hall meetings to listen to concerns.
Over the course of these discussions, several Latinx employees stood up and
said they had, in fact, expressed reservations about the book before it was
published. “It’s unfortunate that those concerns were not heard,” one staffer
said. Neither Cummins nor Einhorn had hired a sensitivity reader, but the
author had shown the manuscript to several Latinx people and asked for
feedback. An employee whose family was from Honduras wanted to know if any of
these readers are from her homeland, where one of the main characters is
supposed to be from. Einhorn said she didn’t know. “For you not to even
differentiate between us is very upsetting,” the employee said. Someone else
wanted to know how the barbed-wire centerpieces “could have ever happened.” It
happened because a Macmillan employee had sent an image of the book cover to
the event coordinator at Gramercy Tavern to serve as inspiration. “The fact is
we didn’t notice it was a problem,” Miller told the staff, “because we had a
blind spot.” (The florist who designed the centerpieces had some regrets too.
“I received the book last minute, and I was very literal about the cover art,”
she told me. “I hadn’t read the book. If I knew more about it, I would have not
done that.”)
By this point, several people said, Miller
seemed to be one of the few senior executives trying to understand the
reaction. In late January, he began to call up the company’s harshest critics
to talk. He reached out to someone who had tweeted that she hoped everyone at
Flatiron would get diarrhea and to a young Latina bookstore employee in Seattle
who had written a blog post about how upsetting she’d found Miller’s statement
announcing the cancellation of Cummins’s tour. “He said, ‘I’m starting to see I
made some missteps,’ ” the bookseller, Rosa Hernandez, told me. Several
Macmillan employees pointedly noted that Einhorn didn’t seem to engage in a
similar way. The editor attended an Oprah’s Book Club special dedicated to the
conversation and answered a few questions, but for the most part, she seemed to
her colleagues to avoid it entirely. “Amy just disappeared,” one employee said.
Macmillan declined requests for interviews
with all major players in the publication process. In response to questions
regarding Einhorn, a publicist said she had encouraged the company to “lean in
and address the criticism.” Several employees suggested that Macmillan has a
“vested interest in preserving Amy’s reputation and future.” Some had heard
that Holt had been struggling financially when Einhorn agreed to take over.
“Holt couldn’t take another hit,” one employee said. They said that Einhorn,
with her eye for commercial best sellers, had been tasked with reviving the
brand. “Amy was doing a huge favor for the company by being willing to go in
and try to fix it,” another employee said. “They needed her to be successful.”
In late January, Oprah said she would
be changing the format of her book-club discussion to “bring people together
from all sides.” In the resulting two-part Apple TV+ special, three Latina
writers joined Cummins onstage. Toward the end, one of the writers, Julissa
Arce, asked Cummins whom she had written the book for. “You’re saying you
wanted to use your book to change people’s minds,” she pointed out.
Cummins leaned toward her. “Of course,”
she said. “Well …”
“So whose minds?” Arce pressed.
Cummins stumbled, paused, and started
again. “The readers’ minds,” she said. “I don’t have a conglomerate reader. I
wrote the book because I hoped it would move people.”
Even if the author didn’t have a
particular reader in mind, there’s little question the book’s publishers did.
Einhorn was known for her ability to capture the interests of the “book-club
crowd.” The industry doesn’t collect demographic data on readership, but when
agents and editors talk about book-club readers, they tend to have a particular
person in mind: “suburban white women ages 35 to 65 who lean liberal,” one
agent explained.
The manuscript for American Dirt had
all the necessary ingredients of a book-club best seller: a mother and child in
peril, a clear villain and an uncompromised heroine, a subject that was all
over the news. Although all of the characters are Latinx, the protagonist’s
perspective is that of a privileged outsider. Before going on the lam, Lydia
had never considered why someone might be forced to leave their homeland. “All
her life she’s pitied these poor people,” Cummins writes in the book. “She’s
donated money. She’d wondered with the sort of detached fascination of the
comfortable elite how dire the conditions of their lives must be wherever they
come from, that this is the better option.” Now, the knowledge that she is one
of them “knocks the breath clean out of her lungs.” The story deals with a
politically divisive issue, but its perspective is apolitical. “In my
experience,” the agent said, “the books that produce this kind of frenzy take
something complicated and simplify it so the book-club reader can find some
thread of connection to themselves while at the same time feeling protected and
safe.” The fact that it was written by a white woman was part of that appeal,
the agent added. “People are tribal,” she said. “White women would rather
listen to a white woman tell them about racism.” Cisneros, the Mexican American
author who had praised American Dirt, felt the book could reach an
audience that her work could not. “The reader,” she said, “is going to be
someone who wants to be entertained. The story is going to enter like a Trojan
horse and change minds.”
The publishers of American Dirt might
have been oblivious to the nuances of the national conversation around race,
but they didn’t misjudge their market. The book spent 36 weeks on the New
York Times best-seller list; according to BookScan, it was the
best-selling novel for adults published in 2020. Einhorn understood her
audience. She would often say in meetings, “Is a woman in Kansas going to buy
this book?” several Macmillan employees recalled. “Is she going to hear the
pitch and want to read it?” Her other controversial best seller, The Help, faced
charges of white saviorism, but when protesters rallied against systemic racism
this past summer, the film adaptation became the most-watched movie on Netflix.
The question in publishing, one agent explained, is always: “Do you meet people
where they are, or do you put something in front of them that you hope they
move toward?” She continued, “To be realistic, to meet people where they are
will sell more books.” A Latinx employee at Macmillan said the book had
achieved “exactly what they meant for it to do.” “Publishers are not set up to
be moral companies,” they said. “They are set up to sell books to readers.”
Publishers, of course, could imagine
different readerships. But like every industry with economic power in the
country, publishing is dominated by white people from affluent backgrounds, and
its editors are taught to acquire manuscripts that personally move them.
Historically, it has been rarer for writers of color to get splashy book deals,
or any deals at all. A recent New York Times analysis found that 95
percent of novels published between 1950 and 2018 were written by white
authors.
After the meeting with DignidadLiteraria,
Flatiron made a number of concrete changes to its business. It hired
Nadxieli Nieto, a board member of Latinx
in Publishing, as an editor-at-large. It organized a committee to
audit its complete catalogue of books to find out how many had been written by
authors of color and to review the advances offered to each writer, and another
committee to review the language used in marketing materials around these
books. (The company would not share the results of these audits.) Macmillan
trained editors in how to hire and work with sensitivity readers, already a
widespread practice in the YA world but one that few adult houses had
previously incorporated into their routines. Several employees said they felt
there was a tonal shift in conversations about race, diversity, and imagined
readership and a feeling of momentum and support behind acquiring and marketing
authors of color. Flatiron’s lead title for 2021 is Gabriela Garcia’s Of
Women and Salt. Garcia, who is of Mexican and Cuban descent, told me
Dignidad’s meeting with Macmillan had given her the courage to approach the
publisher and ask for a conversation. “I was able to be honest about what the
process is like for a writer in this overwhelmingly white publishing industry,
where my book is ushered through all of these different rooms of white people
before it comes to fruition,” she said.
After Einhorn moved to Holt, Macmillan
replaced her with a white editor named Megan Lynch. Lynch had published
commercial hits, like The
Nest, but she was also known for making the careers of literary stars,
including Nell
Zink, Rumaan
Alam, and Helen
Oyeyemi. At 41, Lynch is more than a decade younger than Einhorn and takes
a different view of many of the critical questions at the heart of the American
Dirt saga. “When Megan thinks about acquiring books, she’s not only
thinking about the market right now,” a source close to Lynch told me. “She’s
thinking about authors who are going to be a part of what the future of books
looks like.”
A national reckoning over race this past
summer has compelled publishing houses beyond Macmillan to make changes to
their businesses. Each of the big-five publishers has hired executives of
color, in some cases for prominent roles. Some authors of color have received
seven-figure advances. When Zakiya Dalila Harris secured one for The
Other Black Girl in February, her agent noted that some editors felt
more confident that they could find an audience for her book in the wake
of American Dirt. Several editors and agents told me that discussions in
acquisition meetings have undergone a marked shift since the beginning of last
year, but others were skeptical about how deep or long-lasting these shifts
would be. “It was a little easier to get more money than it had been in the
past for my clients of color,” said Monica Odom, a Black literary agent. “But
that just sets up a new dilemma — are the publishers going to push these books
in the way they pushed American Dirt, so this author can really have
a career?” One Macmillan employee put it bluntly: A book like American
Dirt “will absolutely happen again.”
For its part, Macmillan remains dedicated
to the novel and its author. Under Einhorn, Holt will be publishing the
paperback edition of American Dirt, along with Cummins’s next book. American
Dirt is “a terrific novel and has been embraced by millions of readers,” a
publicist for the company said in a brief statement. “Clearly the book
resonated with a wide audience.”
This past March, as countries were closing
their borders, puncturing the hopes of immigrants and refugees from around the
globe, the popular podcast and blog Moms Don’t Have Time to Read Books sent
out an email that began with a proposition: “With Spring break travel plans
getting disrupted, why not turn to books that will take you around the world
instead?” What followed was a list of eight books recommended by the blog’s
founder, the literary influencer Zibby Owens — a list that perhaps only a white
person like herself could have written. The
Red Lotus, a thriller by the white writer Chris Bohjalian, would take
readers on a “bike tour to Vietnam”; Finding
Chika, a memoir by the white writer Mitch Albom, would transport them
to a sad orphanage in Haiti; and then there was American Dirt, which
would make you “feel like you’ve just been trekking across the desert.” Owens
seemed to understand that the fundamental appeal of the book lay not in its
stated moral mission but in the vicarious thrill of an adventure story. “Head
down to Acapulco and ride the top of the Bestia train with bookstore owner
Lydia and her son, Luca,” she wrote, “as they escape the drug cartel that just
murdered their entire family.”
